In The Irony of Manifest Destiny, William Pfaff argues for a return to realpolitik—basing our foreign policy on our own interests rather than an ideology of “improving” the rest of the world. I am torn on this question, as I dare say most people are. On one hand, I really do hate the massive amount of injustice that I see throughout the world. I hate the explicit sexism throughout the world. And left to their own devices, it seems the one thing you can count on humans to do is to go to war with each other. On the other hand, I know that such an endeavor is hopeless.
Even more than this, there is an assumption at the base of our ideological foreign policy that I always argue against: the end of history. Underlying conservative thinking is always that wherever we are is basically the destination of our historical journey. This kind of thinking indicates that we may be rough around the edges, but otherwise we are perfect. And it is only people who think they are pretty much perfect who can rightly tell everyone else how to live. I don’t like people like that. Nations like that are a good deal worse.
But I can go back and forth on this issue. For example, the ideological imperialism of the Romans and of Napoleon Bonaparte had good and long lasting consequences. Just the same, I cannot bring to mind any American imperialism with similarly good consequences, unless we count the Marshall Plan. But we shouldn’t count it. The question is not whether Americans have fundamentally decent instincts; it is whether we can improve the world by force.
Pfaff makes the case against “helpful” imperialism in a couple of paragraphs toward the end of the book:
Had a noninterventionist policy been followed in the 1960s, there would have been no American war in Indochina. The struggle there would have been recognized as nationalist in motivation, unsusceptible to solutions by foreigners, and inherently limited in its international consequences, whatever they might be—as proved to be the case. The United States would never have been defeated, its army demoralized, or its students radicalized. There would have been no American invasion of Cambodia and no Khmer Rouge genocide. Laos and its tribal peoples would have been spared their ordeal.
I find these arguments very compelling. The only counter argument to them is to point our atrocities where everyone wants to help: Darfur and Rwanda, for example. Pfaff counters that there is nothing in his prescription that stops international efforts at policing and so forth. However, he notes that even still, much care must be taken to assure that more good than bad is done.
If you are at all interested in foreign policy and especially the abuses of the Bush Jr years, I highly recommend reading The Irony of Manifest Destiny. It will make you think, even if it doesn’t provide final answers.
I was extremely sad to learn that legendary actor John Hurt died last week. The announcement came on Friday, but he actually died Wednesday, 25 January 2017. I assume it was due to pancreatic cancer, which he was diagnosed with a year and a half ago. But none of the reporting I’ve read has indicated a cause of death. I’m not linking to anything because even the best coverage gives what I think of as a skewed view of his career.
This period produced one great work of literature that ranks ahead of all others. It is the tale of Don Quixote de la Mancha, authored in two parts by Miguel Cervantes. In our literary canon, the novel has come to dominate the other forms in modern times. And with respect to the novel we can say, “In the beginning was Cervantes.” The genre springs from his work. And even today, after four hundred years, how many novels can begin to compete with this one? It is a work of amazing flexibility; it piles layer upon layer of meaning. It can be studied in universities and performed in Broadway musicals. Cervantes’s genius was to be simultaneously great, complex, subtle, and yet packed with immediate popular appeal. Cervantes fills a great panorama and he perfects the art of the tragicomedy. What seems at first blush a farce, a comic send-up, turns into a work filled with pain, loss, horror and introspection. What seems at first shallow soon emerges, especially in the second part, as a work of great philosophical depth; of wit and profound and timeless wisdom.
I don’t want to write about politics, but I feel I have something of a civic duty to say something at this point. Trump has been president just one week and it’s been even worse than I feared. I no longer think that he couldn’t possibly be worse than Mike Pence, except that he and everyone around him seem to be almost completely unqualified to do their work at the most basic level of competence.
More than 1500 trephined skulls have been uncovered throughout the world, from Europe and Scandinavia to North America, from Russia and China to South America (particularly in Peru). Most reported series show that from 5% to 10% of all skulls found from the Neolithic period have been trephined with single or multiple skull openings of various sizes. Many of the skulls show evidence of fractures. In some cases the operations were incomplete, as if the patients suddenly woke up and terminated the procedure. Some skull openings showed evidence of healing, meaning the patients survived the operations; others did not. In these latter cases it is impossible to determine if the patients were already (or recently) dead or whether the patients died soon after the procedure. Trepanations were performed in children as well as adults and in both males and females. The majority of trephinations, though, have been found in adult males…
Yesterday morning, I started getting a series of tweets from someone calling themselves Conservative Mum — who I assume is who she says she is. I ignored 
As you may have 
